Into the Abyss

The smell of salt in the air was almost nauseating but it would get a whole lot worse within the hour. The water is a frigid 59 degrees and the visibility is estimated to be about 5 feet. The air itself is 65 degrees and feels great, yet as comforting as the breeze feels, I am getting a twisted feeling in my stomach, almost as if my gut’s trying to tell me something, like what I’m about to do is wrong.

My partner and I gather up our belongs: tanks, weights, BCD’s, lights, regulators (primary and secondary), knife, boots, fins, gloves, mask and snorkel. We do our checks for the okay, everything is in place and we were good to go. As we waited for the other groups of two to finish their buddy checks, the pain in my stomach continues and is still trying to warn me not to do this, but my mind keeps telling me yes. As the weight of 75lbs is pulling down on my back, I am praying that people hurry up, but with my mental messages crying out, it only seems that they have slowed down to a crawl is what it seems like.

While most of the groups are finished, we decide to go out into the water and begin our long kick out. Time begins to slow down as wave after wave batter’s my head, the force of them alone would easily make me nauetous if I wasn’t already. My partner and I start to see little dots which turn out to be our group of diver friends. One by one they begin to pile into the water and out past the surf trying to catch up to us. Once we hit our site, we waited for our other participants to reach us.

Once the instructor arrived at the site he began as he always began his talks, “Alright, first off, none of you have to do this it’s up to you, but let me make this clear, you better know what you’re doing once we go down. This especially is not the safest thing in the diving community, deep diving is dangerous, but to get certified we’re going to the very boundary of the depth limit, 150feet. Stick with your buddy, make sure you both have enough air, once we go down that far you will both be using air faster than you normally would at another depth, let’s all do our checks one last time then get together and I’ll meet you at the bottom.”
As the instructor’s head slowly began to go below the surface, my buddy asked me,
“You ready for this?”
I replied with,
“Not really, are you?”
“No, but we’ll be fine”
I slowly began to bite down on the only bit of air I would be receiving for the next 20 minutes. I put my thumb down (the sign for descend) and we began to slowly fall into the water.
Looking at my depth gage closely and feeling the build of pressure in my ears. As I would normally clear my ears in the mountains, I move my jaw up and down and the pressure is gone. I look down at the depth gage, 20feet. I begin to think to myself as the bottom begins to reveal itself, “to think that only a little bit of glass sealed around my eyes and some rubber feeding air to me is keeping me down here, it doesn’t feel right that’s for sure, but man I just can’t believe I’m not even half way down to the destination is crazy”. My partner signals me the okay, I reply with another okay and meet up with the instructor. As the group meets up, the instructor slowly counts out that everyone is in the group and signals us to continue.
The group begins to kick across the endless underwater sand desert to the drop off of the canyon. I relook at my depth gage, 30feet. My stomach begins to reveal itself again, I almost feel like I’m going to throw up my dinner from the night before, (nothing quite like seeing your chicken from the night before under the water). I slowly close my eyes and I step off the drop off and my partner and I slowly begin to free fall in the water.
The greenness of the water, slowly but surely, turns to black. My depth gage is going down quicker than I’ve ever seen it go, 40feet then 50feet then 60feet, all I keep thinking is, “at least I’m not going up this quickly, otherwise I’d be off to the hospital faster than I could process my thoughts”. I was used to utter blackness but this was more than lack of light, it had recently been sturred up from other divers. I reached for my dive light to see if my partner was okay, but the light wouldn’t even reveal him, but at least my hand was tightly gripped around his BCD. I began to think that I wasn’t going to make it back to the top, and this was the last time I would be able to see anyone, my mind was off in another world, one where I was up out of the cold and one where I was with a mysterious figure that looked oddly familiar, it was me, except I could not speak, all he did was point to his wrist, then I thought to look at my depth gage, 170feet.
My first reaction was to look for my partner, unfortunate I could not find him and then, my vision of myself began to shake me and pointed in front of me, it was my partner shining his light at me, behind him was my dive group that looked confused as I was. My mind still playing tricks on me, I began to try to help the instructor in any way I could. The instructor and I noticed a diver kicking off to nowhere, trying to stop the delusional diver, we grabbed on to his flippers, but he only managed to kick my mask off and was still kicking off into the abyss. With my eyes closed shut, I got a tap on my hand with an object that felt like my mask. I immediately put it over my eyes and exhaled through my nose to get the water out of it. My vision slowly returned to me, to my right was my dive buddy and in front of me was my instructor, I then had the scary thought of looking at my air, 500psi. I showed my instructor my unfortunate situation, he gave me the okay to go up, slowly though.
As I began to slowly ascend, my mirror image of myself returned to me keeping me company. I looked at my dive buddy and pointed out my strange image, he shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. Something was wrong, I’m having halucinations of my own person, I began to go down the possibilities of what condition I have, decompression illness; I have no upset stomach which was weird, no air bubbles in my skin, no vertigo, but I was very dizzy. Decompression sickness; I had no advanced symptoms of DCI so that’s good, but then it hit me, Nitrogen Narcosis; intoxication through air at an advanced depth, that had to be it, that would explain the massive headache, dizziness and the hallucination of myself.
As the situation began to unfold, I looked at my depth gage for one last recognition that I was close to the surface, 30feet. As the blackness faded and the scene began to turn green, I was overjoyed and just focused on looking up. The scene was nothing but ripples of green and as the green began to fade, white replaced it and after that it turned to clear blue, I was on the surface breathing in pure air and my headache reminding me that I unfortunately had a dive related injury, but still thinking of the air I had to look at how much air I had remaining in the tank, 45psi. It was too close for comfort, I emptied the tank while I inflated my BCD to stay afloat. The kick in was only a minute from what it felt like but my vision went to black in my car, then I slowly lifted my eyelids up and saw that it was 12 o’clock in the afternoon and thought that it was time to go home. As I began to go, I felt paper on my feet and noticed that it was my deep water certification, oblivious to it I put it in my glove compartment and drove away.